KUALA LUMPUR, March 13 -- Ever wondered where your photos, videos, banking details and personal data go when you upload them online?

Despite confusion of terms like cloud storage, they are actually kept in physical massive data centres either owned or rented by the companies managing your digital footprint.

Malaysia has been home to data centres since the early 2000s, with 25 currently operating in Cyberjaya, Selangor.

But the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is pushing these facilities to their limits, driving up energy consumption and water usage at an unprecedented rate, which Malaysia needs to look into sooner rather than later even as the government is gaining interest and investments into this field.

What's inside a data cen...